Societies Don't Have to Be Secular to Be Modern

Author Francis Fukuyama spoke with Global Viewpoint editor Nathan
Gardels on Tuesday, Oct. 20. Nathan Gardels: In 1989, you wrote an
essay, later developed into a book, that stated your famous "end of
history" thesis. You said then: "What we may be witnessing is not
just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period
of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the
end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of
human government." What mostly holds up in your thesis 20 years on?
What doesn't? What changed? Francis Fukuyama: The basic point - that
liberal democracy is the final form of government - is still
basically right. Obviously there are alternatives out there, like
the Islamic Republic of Iran or Chinese authoritarianism. But I
don't think that all that many people are persuaded these are higher
forms of civilization than what exists in Europe, the United States,
Japan, or other developed democracies; societies that provide their
citizens with a higher level of prosperity and personal freedom. The
issue is not whether liberal democracy is a perfect system, or
whether capitalism doesn't have problems. After all, we've been
thrown into this huge global recession because of the failure of
unregulated markets. The real question is whether any other system
of governance has emerged in the last 20 years that challenges this.
The answer remains no. Now, that essay was written in the winter of
1988 or '89 just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I wrote it then
because I thought that the pessimism about civilization that we had
developed as a result of the terrible 20th century, with its
genocides, gulags, and world wars, was actually not the whole
picture at all. In fact, there were a lot of positive trends going
on in the world, including the spread of democracy where there had
been dictatorship. Sam Huntington called this "the third wave." It
began in southern Europe in the 1970s with Spain and Portugal
turning to democracy. Then - and later - you had an ending of
virtually all the dictatorships in Latin America, except for Cuba.
And then there was the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the opening
of Eastern Europe. Beyond that, democracy displaced authoritarian
regimes in South Korea and Taiwan. We went from 80 democracies in
the early 1970s to 130, or 140, 20 years later. Of course, this
hasn't all held up since then. We see today a kind of democratic
recession. There have been reversals in important countries like
Russia, where we see the return of a nasty authoritarian system
without rule of law, or in Venezuela and some other Latin American
countries with populist regimes. Clearly, that big surge toward
democracy went as far as it could. Now there is a backlash against
it in some places. But that doesn't mean the larger trend is not
still toward democracy. Gardels: The main contending argument
against the "end of history" was offered by Sam Huntington. Far from
ideological convergence, he argued, we were facing a "clash of
civilizations" in which culture and religion would be the main
points of conflict after the cold war. For many, 9/11 and its
aftermath confirmed his thesis of a clash between Islam and the
West. To what extent was his argument valid? Fukuyama: The
differences between Huntington and I have been somewhat overstated.
I wrote a book called "Trust" in which I argue that culture is one
of the key factors that determines economic success and the
possibilities of prosperity. So I don't deny the critical role of
culture. But, overall, the question is whether cultural
characteristics are so rooted that there is no chance of universal
values or a convergence of values. That is where I disagree.
Huntington's argument was that democracy, individualism, and human
rights are not universal, but reflections of culture rooted in
Western Christendom. While that is true historically, these values
have grown beyond their origins. …

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